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Initial Thoughts re Trover

By http://profile.typepad.com/1237764140s22740 //
July 29, 2011
in Social Media

Trover is a new social network and (incredibly) one more innovative company backed by the (what is the word for "prolific" as applied not to writing but to birthing startups) Rich Barton. John Cook wrote about it yesterday in GeekWire.

Trover is grabbing me right away, because it seems committed to using a visual rather than textual approach to sorting, reporting and sharing.

It also feels to me like Trover's design privileges immediacy. If I'm right in that suspicion, Trover might eventually echo and represent an alternative to the new and terribly powerful "explore" feature of Foursquare.

As John points out, there is no shortage of photo sharing apps. I don't know most of them, but I use and like Path and I'm now motivated to try Instagram. (I declined to jump in on the Instagram hype because it seemed at first to be about aestheticizing photos for their own sake; I had other tools to master in that category). But Trover feels first and foremost like an information and location sharing app. The photos are functional.

Unlike Twitter, Foursquare and other social media platforms birthed from text, only later to accommodate and then slowly get smarter about images in the stream, Trover seems committed to organizing navigation primarily around the information that can be "read" in a picture.

Or such does it seem in the early glow of playing with it.

A note on the screenshot: Thai Tom features really prominently in reports on Trover from Seattle's U-District, which speaks well for the platform.